One of my clients makes a range of machines used in factories.
The design is fundamentally unchanged since the '70s save for those that the market insists on (interfaces with other machines) and safety enhancements. There hasn't really been any investment in product design / improvement for years.
The setting up of the machine requires opening it up and fiddling with a huge bank of "DIP" switches - tiny plastic things that break and are easy to get wrong - there are over 100 of these on the machine.
Along comes a Korean start up (my client refers to them as the "up start"). They have the same type of machine with an interface run off a bright dust - proof 10 line LCD display connected via a strong curly cable and it takes 5 minutes to set / reset the machine and it has a memory of the last 256 settings.
What's more their machine can be networked and set up using a program on a PC / MAC.
The Korean machines are proving reliable and have taken 60% of my client's sales.
What is worse, I was at a trade show 3 or 4 years back visiting my client's stand when the same Korean company approached the UK business with just the electronics / software and a demonstration and offered it to the client for a licencing fee as they used the UK machines in their factory and liked it, save for the interface. The UK client refused and the rest is history.
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And the moral of this story is? Change or die?
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The same lesson that the British bike industry didn't learn with electric starts.
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> my client refers to them as the "up start")
Hmmm, I wonder where the problem with the company is............
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Same place as always, management.
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British vs Korean Engineering - Duncan
